The present invention relates generally to the field of image viewers. More particularly, the invention is related to image viewers for viewing medical images such as DICOM format images.
In the clinical practice it is very common to save patient's medical images to a media such as CD or DVD. This is usually done because the patient is required to be provided with a copy and images frequently need to be sent to a different institution.
Medical images are saved in DICOM format, which is not supported by the common operating systems such as Microsoft Windows™ or Apple Macintosh™. Therefore when the images are stored on the media it is very common to include an application to view them because, although DICOM is an international standard, not all DICOM viewers are equivalent. DICOM is a very large standard and not all viewers are capable of properly displaying every modality. For certain modalities some specific processing might be necessary for proper viewing. Therefore the presence of the viewer on the media, does not only guarantee the images can be properly viewed, but also guarantees that the images can be viewed correctly according to the modality of the provided image.
The technical challenge in creating a media viewer for viewing DICOM images that the viewer needs to run on every system, including very old systems, regardless of the memory, central processing unit or operating system. Furthermore, the viewer application should not rely on any user permission because the computer systems in hospitals typically have very tight security through which the user is not able to install any software nor make configuration changes. Thus the application should be capable of running directly from the media upon which the DICOM images are provided. For instance, currently, it is very common to require that a media viewer run on Windows XP™ operating systems released in 2001.
The current solution for medical imaging media viewer is to use antiquated applications, created contemporaneously with Windows XP™ released. These applications satisfy the minimal requirement and will run off the media. However, from a software engineering perspective, this approach has major drawbacks.
Old applications are difficult to maintain, extend and support. The tools necessary to develop them are frequently no longer available or supported. Extension in particular is a critical aspect, medical imaging modalities have changed since these viewers were released and they will continue to change.
In order to take advantage of new technologies, such as web viewing, companies are forced to create a second set of application independent from the media viewer. This requires duplicating the development effort in order to support both versions of a viewer.